09 Nov Friday….so soon….again?

Friday again, and I’m ashamed to report a scant working week…or should that be, fortnight!

I do have a reasonably good excuse, as last week I underwent a weird and stunningly tekkie medical precedure. A doctor put a tiny tube down my neck, (practically my throat – it was Halloween actually, so one too many vampire associations kept springing unnervingly to mind) and fed it right down through my body. I can’t say it was painful, just a bit odd as I felt it glancing past my ribs and then my waist on its journey south. Then he fed a sort of string with tiny bobbles of platinum down through the tube to block something off. So clever and exciting! and so serendipitously echoing my current theme of ‘safar’, which means ‘journey’ in farsi, a language I am currently studying. If you are a new visitor to my blog and would like an explanation of this seemingly fringe choice of language do please glance at my previous blog about ‘safar’ . I’d better not bore my few regulars with too much repetition. Respect to all the visitors

(Update Spring 2016 : not so ‘clever and exciting’ as it turned out; the item introduced into my body quickly migrated via my heart into my lung, sat there for months and eventually had to be surgically removed – friends, stay well away from doctors wherever possible!! Can’t quite bring myself to delete this post yet but eventually I guess I will! )

These medical events are all very well at the time but of course the adrenaline wore off and left me blubby and a bit decrepit, which is why I didn’t get back to work till Sunday, when I spent a great afternoon cutting and sticking with Miles Davis. The results are pasted below. So ends the week and I am back at work; the doctor thoughtfully gave me a goody bag to take home, with a DVD of screenshots and an unused remnant of the bobbly stringy thingy, with which I plan to embellish future collages. Or is that in poor taste? Your response will be most welcome.

Here is a detail from the only painting I worked on this week, Safar 4. The rain came down just as I started to photograph it in the usual place, flat on the front drive, so I only managed to take one photo  which was a bit rain- spotted and shiny. I cropped the dodgy bits to show you the lower half of the canvas.

This morning my farsi teacher, Leyla, asked me how I was planning to include farsi in my paintings. After all, this was one of the possibilities which motivated me to learn the language.

As an answer to that question, the soft greenish patch in this piece is from a farsi poem I printed out on handmade paper. It’s a snippet of ‘Illuminated Blue Ship’ by Jaleh Esfahani from a book of her poetry I found in my local Iranian bookshop in NW11, and I was beside myself with delight when I opened it. First brilliant thing – it has the English translation on one side and the farsi original on the other, which means I can actually pick out and translate odd words here and there. Even more wonderful is that the poems actually spoke to the themes in this series of paintings – mysterious journeys, fracture, longing. Some of them are sad, poignant, but their discovery and inclusion in my cultural and geographical visual wanderings through time is a delight for me.

safar I collage/acrylic : the first image I made  this summer in the safar series:

I adore wrought iron, and this piece grew out of photos taken over many years in Seville, Alhambra, Venice, Prague. I had it scanned, and the image transferred to a polymer etching plate, so I can now make prints which differ intriguingly from this original.